Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Backswing, a mix of Raymond Carver-esque slice-of-life and the dystopia of The Twilight Zone, is the debut full-length collection of fourteen short stories from Aaron Burch, editor of the literary journal Hobart. Each story is told from a male point of view—a twenty-first century man or boy trying to figure out what the hell is going on around here anyway, frantically chasing the next and the next and the next without realizing that, as the cliché goes: Life is not the destination, it’s the journey. Clichés usually become such for a reason, yes? The cover art of Backswing reminds me of Jim Hightower’s There’s Nothing In the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, and many of the characters in this collection are always practicing something—golf swings, sleight of hand, Tae Kwon Do—chasing perfection while simultaneously hugging that stripe in the middle of the road, bewildered and terrified of choosing. Decisions are hard; perfection is harder. You can’t get there from the middle of the road.

“Flesh and Blood” is the story of Ben, a pubescent boy uprooted from his home and moved halfway across the country when his father takes a new job. I alternately smiled and sniffled my way through this one, eloquent with pre-adolescent yearning to understand (everything, anything); to survive hormonal turmoil (for instance, is it gay of him to notice how ridiculously blue Bret Michaels’s eyes are?); to find your tribe and be recognized as a member—of belonging. I grinned and wished I could’ve given Ben a high-five (which would have mortified him—adults are so embarrassing) at the conclusion of his tale. Near the end of this collection we will meet Ben again as an adult in “The Neighbor” and, unfortunately, he seems to fit right in. An intriguing character, Ben has the potential to carry a novel.

The nameless protagonist of “Fire In the Sky” returns to his hometown to join his college roommates for the wedding of a friend. The reunion is awkward as they try to recreate the past, a (mis)remembered idyllic interlude of all-for-one camaraderie, while attempting to reconcile unrealized dreams and good intentions of eternal friendship that have fallen to the demands of jobs and families and the inertia many of us seem to think is required for responsibility. When the evening ends in tragedy they cannot, literally, run away fast enough.

I am less enamored of the philosophical allegories of “The Stain” and “The Apartment.” In the former, a small cult-like community, living in the equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber, notices a stain on the road and spends the rest of the story discussing what it might signify. The stain was not there the last time they looked, at least they don’t think it was there, but then they can’t remember how long it’s been since they looked out that window. In “The Apartment,” a man wanders around his apartment building—it looks like his apartment building—trying to find his unit, but he has become so isolated and his life so bland with the constraints of conformity that he cannot distinguish his home from any of the others. Although not heavy-handed, the lessons of these parables are obvious and might have been more affecting if delivered in more accessible settings.

Aaron Burch

Where Burch really shines is in the stories that begin as Carver and gradually metamorphose, or suddenly fracture, into Lovecraft, often with biblical references. It’s quite the cocktail. There’s the poor man who, upon learning of his brother’s death, succumbs to madness in “Sacrifice” and does just that. Tyler in “Unzipped” is a reassuringly typical teenage boy, mouthing off to his mother and worrying about girls, except for the zipper that appears in his chest one morning.

Burch has a sly, sometimes acerbic humor and an affection for his quirky characters that manages never to slide into indulgence. The individuals populating these stories (bless their hearts) are everyday people dealing with common problems. The alchemy occurs when these ordinary people are rendered extraordinary by deceptively simple yet evocative language that leaves you startled and then comforted, as if Burch has suddenly popped up with a mirror, showing us ourselves. We identify with these characters because they are us. The supposed banality of average lives is no less profound simply because it happens every day. Backswing is a distinctive and accomplished debut, and I look forward to the next collection.

Laurie Auditorium - Trinity University, Diana Holt, an attorney who took up the cause of a wrongfully convicted man on death row, will speak on the case as part of Trinity University's Reading TUgether keynote lecture. Attending will be Edward Lee Elmore, the man whose conviction she fought to overturn, 7PM

Friday, August 8, 2014

Ruby
Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were
too high. The people of Liberty Township wove her into cautionary tales of the
wages of sin and travel. They called her buck-crazy. Howling, half-naked mad.
The fact that she had come back from New York City made this somewhat
understandable to the town.

Ruby may be the
best book I’ve read so far this year and it’s been a great year for books. I
stand in awe of, and humbled by, the talent of Cynthia Bond. She has created a
meaty Southern Gothic gumbo of family, friendship, religion, prejudice, history,
sex, opportunism and violence set in East Texas, which is apparently a natural
theater for a particular brand of backwardness and cruelty endemic to the American
South. Think Jasper and Vidor. Shudder. There are too many trees – makes me
claustrophobic and you can’t see what the hell is going on a hundred yards
away. And you really really need to
know what’s going on in East Texas.

In 1963 Ruby Bell returns to the East Texas township of
Liberty after having escaped to New York City (wherein she described herself as
“…lost and found, all at the same time…”) many years earlier. Ruby had been
taught from a small child that her body was, in her words, a “vending machine,”
and so she put what she believed her only asset to work. As the consort of a
society woman and philanthropist in New York, Ruby met Baldwin, Ellison,
Bukowski, and de Kooning, attended the City College of New York, and wore
Chanel and Pucci. Racism certainly still existed in the North, just not the
drawling in-your-face sort she grew up with. Ruby is called back to Liberty
when her childhood friend dies and observes that she “…has not breathed in that
particular odor of obeisance for nearly a decade.”

Ephram Jennings has lived in Liberty all his life and fell absolutely
in love with Ruby as a child. “…The sweet little girl with long braids. The
kind of pretty it hurt to look at, like candy on a sore tooth.” Ephram was
raised by his sister Celia after his mother was driven insane and committed by
his father, the reverend Jennings (who is best and appropriately described as
the dregs left behind when the scum of the earth moves on to greener pastures),
and the good reverend was lynched. Ephram has never married, remaining with the regimented
Celia, a good Christian woman. She said sarcastically.

Ruby’s poor, battered psyche learned to disassociate as a
small child. What began as a self-defense mechanism merges with an unfortunate
genetic predisposition that expands over the next decade so that Ruby’s mind spends
less and less time in residence. Her descent into madness is excruciating but
her reality is worse. It is an agony to watch Ruby and Ephram come so close to
healing each other while his sister, convinced of her own righteousness and
simultaneously steeped in false Christian humility, attempts to keep them apart.
The welcoming committee of good Christian women is eleven years late. They
aren’t interested in helping Ruby. They aren’t even really interested in
whether Ephram is going to hell. He is an embarrassment in his bid for freedom;
he has slipped the reins and some people will punish you for doing what they are too cowardly and/or unimaginative to do themselves.

Ruby benefits from
an engrossing story, authentic dialogue that is practically a dialect of its
own, and sense of place that is mesmerizing. You can smell the piney woods,
feel the humidity on your upper lip, and hear the gospel songs. But the
crowning glory of Ruby is its
language. I don’t remember when I’ve read anything so beautiful, truly. A
couple of examples:

[When Ephram goes a-courting]

About twenty other people found
themselves wandering the back road to Bell land that day to see if Ephram would
fall down and start foaming the evil out of his mouth. Instead they watched a
lone man clean and tote and haul. But it was still more than enough. It wasn’t
just the exhibition of sin that Celia Jennings had painted so beautifully
during testimony that morning. It was the pure, unadulterated, juicy, unholy
spectacle of the thing. The scarecrow crazy whore of Liberty had taken up with
the township’s mule of a deacon.

[a description of the woods]

Cynthia Bond

The piney woods were full of sound.
Trees cracking and falling to their death; the knell of axes echoing into
green; the mewl of baby hawks waiting for Mama’s catch. Bull frogs and barn
owls. The call of crows and the purring of doves. The screams of a Black man.
The slowing of a heart. All captured, hushed and held under the colossal fur of
pine and oak, magnolia, hickory and sweet gum. Needles and capillary branches
interlaced to make an enormous net, so that whatever rose, never broke through
to sky. The woods held stories too, and emotions and objects: a tear of sleeve,
bits of hair, long-buried bones, lost buttons. But mostly, the piney woods
hoarded sound.

I took seven pages of notes as I read Ruby and at one point my pen has ripped the paper from anger. Make
no mistake: Ruby is not an easy read.
But it is necessary. Have courage and you will feel your soul stretching. There
is no Disney ending here but there is hope. I am rooting for Ruby and Ephram.

Finally, she said, “You think I’m
crazy.”

“Naw, I don’t.”

“Well, you wrong. I’m crazy, but
that don’t make me stupid.”

“Then tell me what you’re watching.”

Without turning her head she took
one step onto a bridge named Ephram.